The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
ReimagiNation: Glenrothes
Rothes Halls, Glenrothes, May 17 to 19
For three days the Edinburgh International Book Festival will descend on Glenrothes to stage a mini literary festival with high-profile guests including Judy Murray, Sally Magnusson, the football pundit Archie Macpherson and Val McDermid, the Fife crime writer.
McDermid also brings her Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers band – including authors Christopher Brookmyre, Mark Billingham and Doug Johnstone, all of whom will speak – for a Saturday night gig.
Yet this ReimagiNation: Glenrothes event is about the place as much as the printed word. The fourth such event the Book Festival has held in Scotland’s New Towns (Livingston, the fifth and final one, will be next), it celebrates the unlikely shared thread of history between these towns and Edinburgh’s festival.
“ReimagiNation came from a realisation that it had been 70 years since Edinburgh was declared a Festival city, post Second World War, but that in the same year the New Town plan for Scotland was established. East Kilbride, the first Scottish New Town, was designated in 1947,” says Janet Smyth, Programme Director of ReimagiNation for the Book Festival, who are producing the event with Fife Cultural Trust. “It seemed to us that the aim of those two visions in the postwar years was very similar – to bring people together and forge a new and ambitious future for Scotland.”
While the Edinburgh Festival – of which the Book Festival came to be a part – was established with the aim of bringing artists from across the continent and the world to Britain, the New Town plan was intended to disperse people, taking them from Glasgow’s overcrowded slums and spreading them countrywide across spacious new homes with lots of green space.
“It was also about new industries, and moving away from the traditional shipbuilding or mining industries to look at things like computing,” says Smyth, noting that Glenrothes was unique in that it was established as a pit town and had to change its identity when the mine closed.
“We decided to embark on this tour of the New Towns and speak to people who live there, both the first wave of people to relocate and school pupils, to find out their hopes for the future and how living there now relates to the vision that was originally established.”
Both groups, she says, talk about the plentiful green space and the ease of walking around Glenrothes, although the younger people mention a lack of things to do.
Led by people’s historian Daniel Gray, the results of this three-month engagement will be presented at the festival, as well as walking tours, debates and activities related to the town itself.
www.booked.edbookfest.co.uk/events/reimagination-glenrothes/